When your present life isn’t what you want it to be, it's tempting to look backward, ruminate, and analyze. But while it can be fun to go down memory lane and it’s useful to review the past to heal, learn, and grow, living in the past isn’t that awesome.

To get closer every day to more and more excitement, creativity, and presence, look forward! Plus, the best way to honor the legacy of everything you miss is to show up now and create brilliance today.

Here are some reasons you want to deliberately stop yourself when you get into “backward thinking” and start showing up for the day 100%!

1. Presence is where and how things grow and changeYou don’t become physically fit by remembering those days when you used to go to the gym and then entering a mental loop of reasons why you can’t recapture these days again. You do it by walking into the gym, onto the field, on the sidewalk, or into yoga studio and doing it. And repeating.

Make it fun and easy, too. If you’re having a hard time sticking to a plan to make a change, look to see if you’re picking methods to go about doing things that are super-complex. I chose a yoga studio across the city with two specific classes I wanted to attend. Guess how present I was with this plan? Yep, I only went once!

2. Looking backward as a habit strengthens the past and drains the present of its power This is a super-simple concept: What you focus on will grow. Not only will that focus grow in importance, it will grow as a habit grooved into your brain.

If you’re lingering in past disappointments, horrible relationship experiences, or traumas, I urge you to go and deal with them with therapy, counselling, and every kind of support you need. Thinking about them often or even near-obsessively will serve only to empower those people and situations.

3. Being present shows you the full truth of thingsIf you’re space-out, checked-out, or looking backward, you won’t see the stuff in front of you clearly. In the complete present, you can see where you can make improvements without feeling like they’re overwhelming. In the present, you can see how lovely things are and how you can creatively solve problems.

If you’ve read my DIY feng shui guide, Feng Shui 101, you’ve read about how my mom preserved our house like a late 1970s museum when my Dad went to white-collar prison. It was her way of trying to preserve the past, but it kept her from seeing what was right in front of her. Both what was great and what was absolutely treacherous (like a new and insanely abusive boyfriend). Living in the past would ultimately be the demise of many things.

4. Presence is where you get alignmentPlants don’t grow in the past. Trees don't grow leaves backward. Nature is always moving forward in a flow. We all get alignment—in body, mind, and spirit—from looking to the now and building the new!

5. Presence is where all the positive emotions liveThis chart developed by David R. Hawkins was clinically tested on over a million people. It states the “calibrations” of energy that exist at different emotional states.

At over 200 on the chart, we get into positive emotions. Over 200 we also start living in the present. It’s worth mentioning that over 200 on this chart you gain real power, life becomes easier, things flourish, and you reach into your creative magic in the biggest ways possible.

So...

Stay light. Stay present. Shift your thoughts off the past and into the right now where you can make your dreams come true!